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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Mystery Pack #1

A few years ago, a friend of mine was telling me a tale. Comic book artist Todd McFarlane had done this museum exhibit of some his work. McFarlane created a "virtual exhibit" of his work so fans all over the world could see his work. And, on each page, he embedded an MP3 about what was going through his mind when he drew those comic book panels, where he was in his career, and stuff like that.

My friend, also being a comic book artist, took inspiration in those tales, went through the website's HTML code, found and downloaded the MP3s, so he could listen to these tales on his own time. One day, while riding the bus to work, he was listening to his iPod on shuffle. The song ended, and suddenly, Todd McFarlane started talking to him. The MP3s had accidentally synced to his iPod.

And he loved it! He loved hearing this little tale from Todd McFarlane, and then the music continued.

"You should do something like that," my friend said. "Like a podcast, but really short episodes. Only two minutes long or so."

And so, I began planning out what I called The Mystery Pack. My artsy-fartsy plan for it was this. You'd download a dozen episodes or so into your MP3 player, hit shuffle, and wait for one to pop up. It was an attempt to recreate the surprise that my friend felt that one day when Todd McFarlane started talking to him.

But, as with a lot of my radio projects, I found the difficult part was trying to dig up engaging content. I only really just made this one episode, in order to get a feel of what the whole thing would sound like.